


and the howls wash through the floors

by Mx_Carter



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Horror, Mind Control, Nightmares, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Female Character, POV Second Person, Possession, Spoilers for Broken Homes, Unreliable Narrator, and the aftermath thereof
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-10
Updated: 2016-12-10
Packaged: 2018-09-07 17:03:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8808826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mx_Carter/pseuds/Mx_Carter
Summary: If I had all the wives of wise King Sol,
  
  I’d kill them all for my Pretty Pol.





	

**Author's Note:**

> this is...a little weird, if i'm honest. i started writing it to try and explore lesley's motivations for defecting, and ended up not sure if she knows them herself. it's quite creepy and very sad. my lesley is definitely not a good person, though she has decent reasons for not being so. if you see her differently, then this may not be the fic for you.
> 
> title from sledge hammer by squalloscope

You know what kind of a man he is. You’ve always known, haven’t you? Men like him, you’ve nicked them on account of the cocaine in their car, and you’ve seen them interviewed about the suspicious death of their third wife. Your mate Brooke dated a boy who would have grown into a man like him for a summer, and you broke her heart by telling her he didn’t care, didn’t love her and probably didn’t even like her, that he was using her for a quick shag and then he’d be gone.

She hadn’t listened, had she, and maybe you could have phrased it a little better. Maybe that would have saved her the heartbreak when he killed himself, driving drunk and high and God knows what else and smashing into a lorry.

But yes, you know him intimately, and you know he’s a posh wanker and his _traditional values, my dear_ are in the grand tradition of posh wankers doing whatever they want and screw everyone else. And still, you tased your best friend in the back and walked off with him.

Still, you betrayed everything you have ever aspired to and everyone you have ever loved.

The truth is, you ask yourself why every day.

The truth is, you have hundreds of answers and none will ever quite satisfy.

The truth is…

 

~~~

 

You are walking back to your nick with Peter, and it’s cold enough to feel your eyeballs in your skull. Thankfully, they’re one of the few bits of you that’s actually exposed. It’s been a long night and you smell of piss, because some dickhead of a tramp pissed on you before you arrested him for indecent exposure. You let him tuck himself back into his trousers first, though it would have served him right if his bloody dick froze off.

When you tell Peter this, he laughs. “I think that comes under cruel and unusual punishment, Constable May.”

“Being pissed on for doing my job is a cruel and unusual punishment,” you mutter crossly.

Peter flings an arm around you, pulling you into his side. You’re both a little drunk with exhaustion and probably the vodka fumes that had been coming off one of the drunks you’d arrested like mustard gas, so it feels natural to just stand there and hug him tight.

You are Lesley May, probie constable in the Metropolitan Police Force, and you already know you’re good at this. You already know you’re going to be extraordinary. One day, you think, you’re going to be sitting in your office thinking about the time you and your best mate hugged each other in the middle of the Strand, him smelling of someone else’s vodka and you smelling of someone else’s piss, and you’ll remember it with fondness.

In your memory, the maniacal cackle of a drunk separates you, and you continue your journey back to the section house. Your feet bloody hurt, and you’re dying for a shower. Peter starts a conversation about who knows what, something geeky, and you tease him and laugh all the way back.

Thinking back on it, you can’t outright say if there was actually any laughter at all.

You have a lot of memories like that these days.

 

~~~

 

 You are in one of the Folly’s practice rooms.

“Again,” Nightingale says, “and really try to concentrate this time.” The lights are flickering, so it's hard to tell, but you could swear there's something wrong with his face.

You levitate the object, fix it in place, and he sets to hitting at it. On the third hit, it moves. You feel that movement like a wrench in your gut.

You’d really thought you had it.

“Again,” he says, and raises the blood-stained cricket bat.

You levitate another object from the pile and fix it in place again. Again the cricket bat is raised. Again the object moves.

You can’t concentrate, the _forma_ slipping through your fingers like sand on Brightlingsea Beach, which has collected in drifts at the sides of the room, sand dunes piled high and spotted with marram grass. There is a thin layer of crunchy grains beneath your feet, and you wonder how Molly will ever get it all up. It’s so cold in here.

“Again,” he tells you, and this time the body part you levitate out of the pile is one of Nightingale’s. You’ve almost run out of Peter parts. His shoulder, you think. It has a tattoo on it, which you saw once by accident, and still surprises you to this day. The shoulder doesn’t stay in place even after the first hit.

“Again,” the man with no face tells you, and you, the woman with no face, levitate Peter’s foot up and up and up, beyond the reach of the cricket bat, until it bumps against the ceiling.

A blood vessel in your brain pops open. In a rushing tide of crimson, everything is gone.

You wake up, cold and clammy with sweat, hands flying to the ruin of your cheeks, covering your eyes.

 

~~~

 

You slept with Zach because he wanted you, because he didn’t give a shit about your face, and because he’s cute, in a Toby sort of way. A little yappy dog that’ll sit, and fetch things for you. That’s what you’d tell Peter if he’d ever bothered to ask.

That’s not quite the whole story, though, is it? You’re not saying Zach has hidden depths or anything, because that boy really, really does not, but you genuinely did like him. He’s very strange and very normal at the same time, like many of the boys you used to know and yet somehow not. He made you laugh, and once he’d heard it one time he spent a whole evening trying to get you to do it again. When he took you to the fae pub, and you noticed that no one was looking, that no one cared, he’d given you a look like _see? I told you_ _so_ , put an arm round you, and introduced you to some of his mates.

 In that moment, Lesley May, you could have accepted your lot, accepted your awful shipwreck of a face and the fact that you were never going to be a DCI, never going to have the glittering career you wanted so much, never going to be anything more than a shadow from a division of shadows with a clean-up rate of next to none, never going to get out of this horrible, filthy fucking half-world where everything is fuzzy-edged and everything is in shade upon shade of mucky grey.

You thought about it, that night. Calling the Faceless Man on the burner phone he gave you and telling him, sorry, deal’s off. It would be so easy, and it would feel so, so good. No more sick guilt every time you looked at Peter’s face, no more carefully balanced lies, no more horrid, painful hope. One time, when you were a kid, you stole the box of Quality Streets and hid them in the attic to enjoy all on your own, and it made you so guilty that you confessed three days later, and gave it back. The sheer relief of that, of coming clean and realising you no longer had to hide, no longer had to worry, that the world was back to how it always used to be and you were safe and forgiven, was like finally getting to pee after a massive car journey.

You would tell them, and there would be anger, and investigations, and perhaps you would never quite be trusted again, perhaps Nightingale would turf you out and never teach you another spell, perhaps Peter would even stop being your mate, but at least you’d be able to say _yeah, when push came to shove, I did the right thing. I chose my friends and my colleagues over myself. I was good._

Then you went to sleep and dreamed of the sand of Brightlingsea Beach beneath your toes, and of laughter, high and inhuman and as full of vicious glee as a crowd of drunken football fans watching on of the other team’s supporters get the shit kicked out of them.

When you woke up the conviction was gone.

 

~~~

 

One night, when you and he are in a nice country cottage somewhere in France, he comes into your room. You’re not asleep – too many nightmares – but four sisters and an overprotective dad mean you’re very good at faking it. He doesn’t notice, and settles in a chair beside the bed you’re curled up in.

“I know you’re in there,” he says, and for a second you think he’s talking to you. Then you don’t know who the hell he’s talking to. “I know you’ve always been in there, clinging on like a limpet.”

His voice is very soft and smooth, like a cat’s fur.

“You weren’t going to let go, were you? Oh, sure, most of you is pinned tight to London Bridge, but I’m certain there’s something left. Some little shadow of you left, tucked away in poor Miss May’s brain.”

You hold very still, like when the house creaked in the right way and you were sure, so sure there was a monster in the room, and if you screamed for help it would attack you and all you could do was stay perfectly still and perfectly quiet and hope you were imagining the shifting feeling in the darkness, hope you were imagining the third set of lungs breathing, hope if you just stayed still and quiet it would get bored and go away.

You’re a fly trapped in amber, a butterfly pinned to a specimen board. Your chest is tight with all the monsters that are perched on it, all the monsters that will never leave. The monsters you put there.

The truth is…

After half an hour, he gives up and leaves. You don’t sleep that night.

 

~~~

 

You’re relaxing in the coach house, Peter reading one of his nerd books about architecture, which is his version of comfort reading, and you practising your Latin. Normally you do your studying in the library, but he did his this morning, while you were having a lie-in, and you don’t fancy being alone right now. It’s quiet, and nice. Really nice. Safe.

Eventually you’re done, and he puts down his nerd book and finds you both something to watch. Film4 are showing Mr and Mrs Smith, which is a film you’ve watched together several times because it falls into the nice space between his taste – action and sci-fi, sometimes a little fantasy if it’s bloody enough – and yours – romcoms and romances, ranging from truly naff to properly heartbreaking, historical romance if it’s good. It’s been a while since the last time you watched it, though, so you nod and both settle in on the sofa with beers. It’s only about a quarter of the way through, and you can both quote parts of the dialogue besides, so it doesn’t really matter.

You don’t know how to talk to him. There’s so much that has passed between you, so much you don’t know how to retrieve. You want to talk about feelings, he doesn’t but you do. Call you a girl, but no matter how seamlessly the two of you still banter, no matter how comforting it is sometimes to not have to explain yourself to someone because they won’t ask you, you’d still like to have a straight conversation with your best mate.

The people at group say similar things all the time, stories of friends who are happy to keep pretending everything’s great, and won’t even begin to consider that it might not be.

 _Peter,_ you think, _I dream about Punch’s laughter and walking on sand, while the gulls scream with his voice. I dream about watching you and Nightingale through a prism of broken teeth and not being able to say a thing, not being able to make a single sound, even though I know that’s not how it actually happened, that actually everything was normal and fine except for those horrible gaps, the gaps I didn’t notice because I forgot to notice, because he made me forget every time and then forget that I’d forgotten and so sometimes I dream that I killed you, killed Nightingale, killed my parents and my sisters and then I forgot about it and then I remember. I dream about all the people I might have killed, all the awful things I might have done that we don’t know about because we never did piece my timeline together completely, and I don’t know what I’ve been made to forget, I don’t know what I’m missing, my brain’s like Swiss cheese with all the things I may have lost. I dream about betraying you, about killing you, about dying alone with my head covered in bandages on the floor of the coach house with a bloody Roman spear driven through my chest. I dream about watching you put it there._

 _Peter_ , you think, _I love you. I love you and I don’t. I hate you and I don't. I’m sorry and I’m not._

_Mostly, Peter, I just want my fucking face back._

Something blows up on the screen.

 

~~~

 

When you wake up, your face is completely covered in bandages. There aren’t any mirrors anywhere in the hospital room, and all the reflective surfaces are angled away from your bed. Nothing hurts, but that’s probably because of the drugs.

Everyone behaves exactly how you’d expect them to, and if you could talk without your face falling off more than it already has, you’d scream at them. As it is, all you can do is write grumpy things on the whiteboard they give you.

Peter comes to see you. He tells you about the women with teeth in their vags, and the aftermath of the whole Henry Pyke mess. Dr Walid told you some of it, of course, but Peter tells you like a policeman would, like a best mate would, and you appreciate it more than you can ever tell him.

Eventually, you pretend to sleep. You’re tired, and a bit tired of him, and very tired of not being able to talk. That means you see him drop his head into his hands.

Suddenly, quite suddenly, it's too much and you ache to be vicious, to be cruel. To snarl at him _I don’t give a fuck how you feel, Peter bloody Grant, you’re not the one with no fucking face, are you? You’re the one who got rescued from the CPU and_ chosen _to learn fucking magic and be the second to last fucking wizard in fucking Britain, and you’re going to make DS sooner than I would even if I wasn’t on indefinite fucking leave because a fucking monster ghost demon crawled inside my head and ripped my face apart and I have_ nothing, _Peter, I have_ nothing, _so don’t you dare put your head in your fucking hands and expect me to feel sorry for you!_

You sincerely don't know how much of that you actually mean.

You feel sharp, like all your edges have been filed into points. You feel dangerous, Lesley May, in that hospital bed, dangerous and impotent all at once. You feel ruined and cold and very tired, and you feel like you’re wearing all your organs on the outside of your skin.

The truth is…

Half a year later, you eat all his grapes when he’s in hospital. You’re not sure how much of that is you being a best mate, and how much is revenge.

These aren’t things you care to analyse.

 

~~~

 

Nightingale is the one who recommends the group – or rather, Dr Walid recommends the group and, when you say no, Nightingale backs him up. He makes it clear that this is an order you’re allowed to refuse, but you’re so shocked by his departure from the stiff-upper-lip, keep-calm-and-carry-on stereotype that you agree without thinking.

It’s actually pretty helpful, in some ways. Everyone else has facial injuries, most less awful than yours but some on a par, and one or two that are genuinely even worse. They talk about the same things you have problems with – the stares, the whispers, the stomach dropping daily horror of looking in the mirror and realising all over again what has happened. One bloke, who’s now forty and has had his injuries for twenty years, says he’s gotten used to it.

“Give it ten years,” he tells the rest of them, “and I swear to God you won’t even notice.”

When you hear this, Lesley May, it feels like you’ve stepped on a piece of glass or sharp flint, buried in the sand.

Yeah, you’re a realist, but trauma is a strange and funny thing, and you hadn’t noticed but you’d been thinking _when I get my face back_ even before you joined the Folly and Nightingale started ransacking the libraries with you wholesale. _When I get my face back. When this is all over. When I wake up with clear skin and a working jaw and my old voice and all these terrible things have been washed away like patterns drawn into the sand at the beach_.

 _When everything is normal again_.

You don’t want to get used to this. The thought of getting used to this is genuinely terrifying.

Afterwards, you’re in a café, bracing yourself to face the Folly again, and a man who you don’t recognise sits in the seat in front of you. You know something’s wrong when your brain forgets to do what you normally do with strangers, which is jot down a little description in your memory just as you would in your notebook. You try, but your mind just skips merrily away from the details of his face, his nose, his mouth. Even his eyes. You remember Peter telling you about looking at the Faceless Man, and your stomach drops out for the second time that day.

Your legs tense and you’re half-standing, hand raised to hit him in the face with – oh you don’t know, a fork or something – when he lays his hand on yours and says, in a soft, posh voice, “What if I told you I could give you your face back?”

It’s like you’ve been hamstringed. You fall back into your chair.

“Talk fast,” you tell him.

You’re going to tell Nightingale, you really are. You’re going to walk into the Folly and tell him exactly what went down, maybe even volunteer to be a double agent. You can feel the rightness of it burning in your chest.

You walk into the Folly and Nightingale calls you into the library, sits you down and tells you, in plain, clear language, that there’s nothing he can do for you.

“Modern medicine is far more advanced than any of what I can find. I’m terribly sorry, Constable, but the best we can do for you is keep your appointments with the specialists.”

“Okay,” you say, as you shake and shake in front of him, in front of the frank empathy in his eyes, as somewhere in the back of your head someone winds up the music box and Mr Punch’s laughter begins to shriek out, your own personal soundtrack, “okay.”

When you were twelve, your dad’s watch was stolen. It was from his grandad, and he loved it as much as he loved anything that wasn’t his family. Three days later, the police found it and returned it to him. You know now that statistically speaking, that was a bit of a miracle, and it was very likely that they arrested whoever stole it on a drugs bust or something else related, and just happened to pick it up on their way out. But when you were twelve, and watching your father trying not to cry with relief, cradling his beloved watch, all you knew was that you wanted to be a policewoman. You wanted to preserve order, enforce the law, make sure people who broke it were punished.

You were going to be strong and kind and selfless and brave.

You don't know what you are now.

In the end, Lesley May, you have four sisters and you were a bright girl in an overcrowded secondary school, and you’ve gotten very used to doing things that needed doing for yourself. In the end, all it took for you to turn your back on everything you ever believed in was the realisation that Henry Pyke and Mr Punch really, truly did rip your face off, and the only thing you can do to get it back again is to turn your back on everything you ever believed in.

Maybe you are selfish. Probably you are selfish. You’re not being selfless, that’s for sure. Maybe it’s Punch, maybe it’s Pyke, maybe it’s trauma and pain and the gaping hole in you that is the loss of your face, the loss of your identity, the loss of everything you prided about yourself and everything you are. Maybe it’s just you, who you always were, beneath the surface. Waiting.

The truth is…

 

~~~

 

The truth is, Lesley May, that you made your choice. You did, with a clear head full of screams and laughter and clear eyes that haven’t cried since Mr Punch wrecked your tear ducts along with everything else on your face. In your worst moments, you ache to blame it on someone else, anyone else, but you are too strong for that, even now.

You made your choice. You looked at your life and you realised that this would never be enough for you, that you could never stand to be the third-in-command, subordinate to a relic and to a man who, yeah, may be your best mate, but is definitely, definitely, not as good a copper as you. You could never stand to look in the mirror day in and day out until somehow the ruin of your face, the gruesome visual reminder of everything the monster bastard piece of dogshit did to you, became normal, natural, became right.

The truth is, Lesley May, that you regret it, with everything in you, but you know in your heart that you would make the same choice, again and again, as many times as you had to. The truth is you are a traitor, a betrayer, a liar and a coward, but you are at least honest. The truth is, you are not evil and you are not good and you are not Nightingale’s apprentice or Seawoll’s blue-eyed girl or the Faceless Man’s right-hand woman or Henry Pyke’s starring role or Pulchinella’s puppet, or even the best mate that Peter is never going to give up on. The truth is, you are all these things and you are none of them and some days you are nothing at all.

These answers do not satisfy. They will never satisfy. They are all you have.

 

~~~

 

The night of the day that Brandon Coopertown kills his wife and baby, you slip out of Peter’s bed when you’re sure he’s asleep and you walk down to Covent Garden. It’s freezing cold, and the streets are as close to deserted as they ever get in this part of the city. You used to find London this early in the morning eerie, but you’ve come back late from patrol enough times now to be used to it.

Everything feels normal, so normal and natural that you don’t once think to question what you’re doing until you’re standing at the portico of the Actor’s Church and you think, _why am I here, again?_

Then you hear it, drifting through the air, from the very stones themselves. A song, sung by a voice that sounds like a solo and a chorus, like a horrible high-pitched parody of how a human sounds, like the very worst sound in the world.

_I love you so, I love you so,_

_I never will leave you, no, no, no,_

_If I had all the wives of wise King Sol,_

_I would kill them all for my Pretty Pol._

There is a rushing. There is a sensation like something hits you, Lesley May, full in the beautiful face. Like all the intimate human parts of you are being twisted and squished out of the way so something filthy and malicious can force itself in. Maybe you scream.

You wake up in Peter’s bed, his arms wrapped securely around you. You must have had a nightmare – and no wonder, you think – because the skin around your eyes is damp and stiff with tears. You sit up, check the time – early, but not too horrible – then get up and dress, and go make yourself a cup of coffee.

Halfway through making it, you drop the bag of coffee under the sudden, leg-buckling sensation that something is terribly, awfully wrong and you have to –

You forget.

The coffee is average, the sort you find in places where the people buying it need it too badly to get bad quality, but don’t have the cash for great. You take big sips.

Must have been one hell of a nightmare.


End file.
